I was surprised to see Apple exposing the device boot time. Not sure why a typical app would need this, and in a world in which iPhones are infrequently rebooted, the combination of this with other fields must indeed be very deterministic.
Most ways to collect boot time are a "Required Reason API," so they declare through NSPrivacyAccessedAPITypeReasons, meaning AppLovin apps are (unsurprisingly) lying about what they are doing with the data. There's a fair amount of research into this, for example at https://mysk.blog/2024/05/03/apple-required-reason-api/ and https://blog.appicaptor.com/2025/02/05/apples-required-reaso... (which also documents a workaround that Apple's static analysis tools didn't detect at the time).
My general conclusion is: it's stupid that Apple continue to allow this and Trust Us Bro is not a good permission system to allow app developers do shady things, especially when research indicates that they are, unsurprisingly, doing shady things. Apple's static analysis based App Store approval system is also historically swiss-cheesey and I know they could do better. Overall, thematically a black mark on Apple, which has always been surprising for me because they tend to genuinely care about privacy in many other facets.
I had no idea Apple exposed that information. And they're clear that the data _should not be sent off the device_:
> 35F9.1
> Declare this reason to access the system boot time in order to measure the amount of time that has elapsed between events that occurred within the app or to perform calculations to enable timers.
> Information accessed for this reason, or any derived information, may not be sent off-device. There is an exception for information about the amount of time that has elapsed between events that occurred within the app, which may be sent off-device.
> 8FFB.1
> Declare this reason to access the system boot time to calculate absolute timestamps for events that occurred within your app, such as events related to the UIKit or AVFAudio frameworks.
> Absolute timestamps for events that occurred within your app may be sent off-device. System boot time accessed for this reason, or any other information derived from system boot time, may not be sent off-device.
IDE written in Java indexing 10K files, compiling + running spring boot apps that take 30 seconds to start on the M4, or C++ compilation, or rust compilation.. Or maybe you were sarcastic?
and this is my developer. She consumes one hundred fifty gigabytes and runs two hundred thousand dollar, custom-tooled GPUs at ten thousand tokens per minute. It costs four hundred thousand dollars to develop…for twelve seconds.”
[Laughs]
“Oh my Claude, who touched settings.json? Alright…Who touched my LLM!?”
If AGI were to happen, or if AI became a trillions-of-dollars-generating industry, you wouldn't want to have your data-centers which might be the most valuable thing on Earth be located in a foreign country. All this investment in infrastructure is not purely based on where the industry is now, but predicated by where those who are bullish about it think it will be in 5-10 years.
This is a highly sensational take that is basically fan fiction. From "the era of purposefully frustrating humans is over", to "the added bonus of the collapse of the US economy. Frankly, it’s well deserved." and "everyone in the world is rooting for the Chinese models"; nothing of that is grounded in reality.
The Chinese models are open source because they are not state of the art. Once they catch-up or lead, they will likely close them down by a government mandate. Just like Meta was fine with Llama being open source but once they started to get close to OpenAI/Google/Anthropic, they shifted their language to "maybe we won't keep doing that."
The idea that AI will end the "rent-seeking class" that has effectively existed for thousands of years is... not going to happen! The business model just adjusts. And if AI is going to be an economy-shaping super disruptor, the cloud-hosted models will continue evolving beyond what you could ever run at home under the desk.
> The Chinese models are open source because they are not state of the art
I think geohot is burying the lead in this text in his post with a lot of speculation.
It's not not that these specific models will become closed it's that the hardware/hosting vendors have an incentive to train models where inference is custom tuned to their chip's dimensions and VRAM.
The Chinese models do a great job of showing what's capable on consumer/prosumer hardware because of export restrictions but anyone entering the hardware space has the same incentives to undercut the frontier labs so they can sell more hardware.
It's also not clear if being at the forefront of inference quality really matters. The open source models appear to be doing a fine enough job of keeping up even if they're a few months behind. So it seems like there's not much of a technology moat for these labs other than the capital costs of training/serving.
> the "rent-seeking class" that has effectively existed for thousands of years
This "rent seeking class" is not a historical universal, regardless of how much college marxists insist that it is. Leaders can be good or bad, and they hold power in different ways. In America today we have bad leaders (across the entirety of the political spectrum) - and AI poses a lot of challenges in how they hold power. This is not to say Chinese leaders are any better - but the way they hold power is not challenged by AI. Business models will indeed adapt - but the condition is excellent, as they say.
I like this. It'd be great to see such a table of the key issues with proposed solutions, to highlight how the waste isn't an insurmountable impossibility to solve. Having said that, federal lobbying by the healthcare industry was $750 million in 2024 [1], and this is the blocker that needs to be addressed first to be able to enact change.
We rarely discuss the primary source of health care cost differences in the United States -- US doctors get paid a lot more than elsewhere. I haven't seen a credible proposal to address that. Most of the salary difference can be blamed on deliberately created shortages of doctors in many specialities. Not enough medical school slots (horror stories among my kid's friends of not getting accepted) and then also shortages of residencies that allow foreign trained doctors to work in the US. The only change in recent memory is replacing some primary care physician services with nurse practitioners.
I really don’t think doctor salaries are the primary difference when they make up less than 10 % of health care costs:
> However, new research by Stanford health economist Maria Polyakova and colleagues — using unique data on physician income — shows that physicians’ personal earnings account for only 8.6 percent of national health-care spending
That’s the thing about American health care costs. We pay so much more than everyone else, but there’s no obvious single thing that costs more, or even a few factors together. It’s a ton of different things all adding up. Which means it’s very hard to fix, because there are so many different things you’d have to fix.
Doctors are only part of the problem. Nurses and all of the other skilled positions also all suck up huge amounts of money because there are shortages of all of them.
It was bad even before COVID, it’s even worse now. There are tons of regulations prohibiting the significant increase in creating new doctors and nurses (and air traffic controllers, but that’s a different but remarkably similar story).
Limits on new providers, and tons of corrupt regulation keeping people from opening new medical schools, clinics, and hospitals.
A ton of it is simple supply and demand - and the supply side is capped. Go to a place with a functioning competitive market and the prices (and wages) are a fraction of what they are in the US.
Again like doctors, nurse wages aren’t a major factor in the discrepancy between US healthcare costs and elsewhere. They are a factor, in a death by a thousand cuts situation.
In a source posted by another commenter, their wages are accountable for 5% of the difference.
I also don’t think it’s accurate to say regulations are what’s prohibiting an increase in nurses. They don’t have a government imposed mechanism like residency funding that creates a bottleneck like the one in medical training.
We have a nurse shortage because we have an aging population increasing demand, it’s a tough job, and people are leaving the profession.
But why is it a tough job? Partially it's the shift hours, they could offer it with less hours and more nurses for example. But they don't due to undersupply, and on it goes.
Idk why but I feel the need to add an empty “co-sign” comment. It is 100% this and I have so many stories from friends who are doctors and nurses that back up every detail.
One note: the doctors won’t agree or want to hear this, as they too are human, but listen to how they talk about nurses. Hit me once I had both a CRNA (advanced nursing degree in anesthesiology) and an anesthesiologist friend
Edit: glad I did add an empty cosign, right after replying, the parent is now downvoted to gray. And gets it much, much, better info than any other comment, and I read all of them. Last thing I’ll throw out to back it up is, check into who decides how many seats there are at med schools. Can’t remember the exact name but it’s basically the doctors union / professional organization. AMA?
If they are paying them 6-month severances like Block did, this means they are effectively saying 1,600 people for 6-months wouldn't have fixed JIRA's usability and performance, which if they could have done like many have been begging, they'd would probably make more money long-term than this firing would save.
I wholeheartedly believe that they could not have fixed it with 9,600 people months of work. They haven’t been able to fix it with many multiples of that.
> They haven’t been able to fix it with many multiples of that.
which may actually be the problem. I suspect that there is actually some ideal ratio that could be calculated of Input Fields / Dev, LoC / Devs, or maybe Unique Pages / Dev, or some mix of all of the above. Some of the metrics I hear out of places like airbnb absolutely blow my mind (>5000 engineers! wtaf are they all doing?!?). I can sort of see the #s at google, MS making sense given the breadth of the problems they are solving, but other places, not so much.
There was an interview with a lead tech at Uber about this some years ago, with the conversation starting with "why is the app so bloated!?" (in terms of megabytes) and his answer also answers your question:
The smooth and simple interface of the Uber app is the tip of the iceberg. His example was that their users don't (and won't) reinstall the app because they travel overseas. If anything, the time when you've just stepped out of an airport is precisely when you want the app to work smoothly!
The hiccup is that many countries have their own payment systems, Byzantine tax codes where this may or may not be displayed up front to the user (in various currencies and formats), there may be local laws around taxi-like services, etc... Some of those laws apply to areas smaller than a city, or may apply only to airport pickups, or the CBD area during congestion, so on and so forth.
The "core" app might be a simple thing that you can bang out over a weekend with an AI and a decent UI framework, but then you need to "draw the rest of the owl". Don't forget that there must be a matching app for the drivers! Different categories of drivers offering services that may be local to a region and totally absent elsewhere: rikshaws, tuk-tuks, taxi boats in Venice, and who knows what else!
AirBnB is very similar to Uber in this respect. They have to deal with about a hundred countries worth of law, often down to the state level. There's fraud detection. Customer support. Integration with travel agencies. Government-mandated reporting. Etc, etc...
You're assuming performance has been the core priority, or even a priority at all, and I think this is a bad assumption to make. I would estimate a much smaller number of people-months of work if I were you.
Dev users assume the only problem a product can solve is performance, when there is a lot more than that in reality.
Maybe in the past companies wouldn’t take the extra time for performance enhancements - but they’re apparently saying that AI is sooo good and speeds up work that they don’t need all of these extra people. So if their product was sped up it would enable their customers to work faster and lay off all of their extra employees (or just keep everyone and just do more stuff faster).
So are they doing this to make the product better or, as others have mentioned, they can’t innovate further and can’t grow their market so they need to cut costs.
They need to just clean slate start from skratch. I don't believe that code base can be saved.
AI means it's easy to copy any SAAS now right? so should be easy /s
I mean probably not. It's not 1,400 hardcore engineers and 200 Jony Ives being let go, it's a mix of everyone including randoms like HR and the person who orders the office coffee. Business is not good.
Okay I just wrote an "it's not, it's..." organically, is this the zeitgeist or what.
It's not a zeitgeist, it's a common English sentence structure.
The em-dash observation makes sense. Obviously a minority of people reach for an actual em-dash. The "it's not X, it's Y" complaint is totally bonkers. We might as well call proper spelling a "sign of AI". I.e. yes, AI does it more than humans, but not by so much that it makes sense to be suspicious when you see it.
The Neo is incredibly executed by Apple, and one they must have been planning for for years: to be able to create a machine this good at this price. I wouldn't be surprised if it dramatically reshapes the laptop industry.
Spec-wise, this is as good as an M1-M2 Air, which is already an over-powered device for most non-professionals. All the "compromises" they made, like no center stage in the camera, less ports, only one monitor support, "just WiFi 6E", and others, are all non-issues for a typical average consumers.
And the price is the best it could be. At $499 for students, in a year's time when Gen2 is released, you will find a new Gen1 at possibly $399, and a refurbished Gen1 at even less. I don't see why anyone who wants an "entry-level/starter laptop" would buy anything but a Neo. We already are in a world in which average people don't need specific Windows-only apps. Most common apps are either cross-platform or web-based.
Dell, HP and alike are lucky that they're being enamored with datacenter server demand. I expect them to shift-away from the consumer laptop market and focus more on the enterprise in the coming years, which could have negative consequences for their pro-lineups.
Had similar thoughts until googling what the cheapest Chromebook on Amazon costs: $139.
I’d still get a Neo and for students it’s probably the right choice - chromebooks are just a browsers after all.
But pricing wise this laptop is a decade too late. The netbook of the day (chromebooks?) are just unbelievably cheap.
Apple will still sell millions of these and keep on eating up market share.
Agreed! For the longest time, I feel like for most "regular" people (mostly used for web browsing, communication and light gaming) the choice between windows and Mac has mostly come down to price. I feel like this is the first attempt by Apple to disrupt this segmentation and take a stab at the mass market as well.
I love the website; the design, the video, the NSFW toggle, the simplicity.
I love the idea; definitely something I ran into a few times before and wish I had.
Unfortunately, I am not installing a closed-source daemon with access to the filesystem from an unknown (to me) developer. I will bookmark this and revisit in a few weeks and hope you had published the source. :)
I agree. It’s a neat idea and I’d be interested in seeing the details. A downloadable tarball is a lot better than nothing, but it still makes more work to evaluate a random project than I’m inclined to perform. It makes me assume the commit history is ugly in some way (being charitable and assuming the code itself isn’t). Hearing that it’s developed within a monorepo of unrelated projects and experiments isn’t inspiring either. Anyway, perhaps someone else will download the source and report back.
Edit: To be clear, I’m not saying any of those things are true, just that those are the first thoughts I have when someone says their source is open but makes it difficult to view. In this age in which it’s so trivial and commonplace to make source easily viewable.
Except that it doesn't need to be consumer to start off. You can build specialized robots that deliver value at a massive scale. Imagine a "Prep Cook" at a restaurant, there are millions of these around the world. If the Optimus can do that job for a price of $1,000/month, that's likely to be more efficient and better quality than a human can do. And there has to be many jobs like this.
Robots that specialise in one thing already exist. In big factories, where they'll peel and dice tons of onions per hour, being fed via unsexy conveyor belts into massive dicers.
That's the problem with robots like Optimus. The "specialized" part (Cutting the onions) is 1% of the skills. You'd still need to other hard 99% (Prehensility, vision, precise 3D movement, etc.).
And if you sorted the hard 99%, what's the point in specialising in cutting onions, when the same exact skills are needed to fold and put away laundry?
No, automation doesn't reduce jobs, i.e. doesn't reduce consumer spending, as consumer spending is determined by output, which automation boosts.
The savings from automation in a particular sector are spent elsewhere — wherever services are more costly (in labor). That's the dynamic behind Say's law, which shows that spending on less automatable jobs like barbers and physical therapists increases as automation reduces costs in other sectors of the economy.
I understand this is a well-developed economic theory and I am complete uninformed, but this doesn't make intuitive sense at all.
If 1 million prep cooks are replaced by robots, will food become cheap enough that those prep cooks can all get jobs as barbers, and the money people spend on food will shift to haircuts?
Will the food be so cheap that all those prep cooks can afford to learn to cut hair?
Also consider the money velocity of a human vs a robot. A human is probably paycheck to paycheck spending everything they earn. Robot earnings go back to company, which makes the stock go up, 90% of which is owned by billionaires who just keep hoarding and hoarding.
Adaptation does not require mass retraining into new professions; it happens through task simplification, AI-augmented shallow competence (less qualified people can do more advanced work), partial work, income stacking, and lower subsistence costs. As automation advances, less-automatable sectors (personal services, care, local physical work) see wage pressure rise, consistent with Say’s Law, because yes, what people save at restaurants, is spent instead at barbers, massage therapists, nail technicians, etc.
As for the gains from robotics, they go just as much to workers as to investors. Remember, investors are competing with each other, so they have to keep cutting prices. And that means workers see their wages buy more goods and services, given those goods and services cost less to buy. When wages buy more, that's effectively the opposite of inflation. In inflation-adjusted terms, that equates to a wage hike.
A general drop in services, yes. A drop in the services being provided by the robot, probably not. I doubt if many Prep Chefs are regularly eating at the restaurants they work at. When the robots are taking
millions of jobs in all areas of service, there might be a problem.
